George Dureau

King of the New Orleans Art Scene

New Orleans based painter, sculptor and photographer George Dureau (1930-2014) died from complications of Alzheimer’s disease. His black and white photographs, charcoal sketches and arresting paintings captured the spirit of New Orleans at its highest and lowest levels. Many of his art works were strongly homoerotic in nature, and he favored nymphs and satyrs, as well as live male models who were dwarfs and/or amputees. His art was placed all over New Orleans, in restaurants, bars, museums and outdoor public spaces.

Dureau was a larger than life character, often seen on his bicycle or black Jeep cruising through the old quarter. His unkempt long hair and beard, coupled with his booming bass voice spewing forth bawdy comments, led some to label him Mephistopheles. Dureau called himself a “neo-classical homosexual,” a reference to elements depicted in his paintings. He had a rare talent for being able to paint outsiders, often picked up off the streets, in a way that elicited no pity. There was always a dignity in the expression of his subjects.

George was a legend in his own time, and seemingly every citizen of New Orleans knew who he was. While it would have been to his professional advantage to relocate to NYC, he stayed put, reigning over his home town art scene. In fact, Dureau managed to forge a national and international reputation while staying home.

He had a vibrant personality and sharp wit, and he was a great entertainer. His buffet spreads looked like still life paintings, everything arranged just so. His youthful work as a window dresser was evident. Dureau’s apartment/studios were a riot of “arranged” clutter, a delight to the eye, which joyfully darted from one surprise and treasure to the other.

When recent medical costs led him to sell artworks and furnishings, his friends rallied and made sure the bills got paid. They were more than willing to give back to a local denizen who had brought such quirky interest and joy to their lives.

Mark Beard

The mural of artist Mark Beard is the centerpiece of the interior of the Abercrombie and Fitch Flagship Store on Fifth Avenue in New York City. At left is a  portion of the artwork on the wall and ceiling of the popular store.

Using an alter-ego (assumed name) of Bruce Sargeant, Beard's works, such as large paintings, friezes and bronze sculptures, are featured in Abercrombie & Fitch's flagship stores in New York, Los Angeles, London, Milan, Paris, Brussels, Amsterdam, Copenhagen and Tokyo. The 2008 commission for the Tokyo Abercrombie & Fitch store is his largest to date – an eleven story tall mural.

Much of Beard's artwork is decidedly homoerotic. Here's a painting titled "Three Handstands".

Mr. Beard is a New York City based American artist who was born in 1956 in Salt Lake City. His great-grandfather was an early Mormon pioneer who emigrated from England to Utah. Beard’s works are in many museum collections, including the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, the Whitney, Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. the Graphische Sammlung in Munich and Princeton, Harvard, and Yale Universities. More than 200 private collections (such as that of Ralph Lauren) include his artworks.

Mark’s studio (above) is littered with oil paintings, life drawings, heroic bronzes, ceramics, and architectural maquettes, illustrating that he is a virtuoso in many mediums. A noted set designer, he also has paintings, prints, sculptures and handcrafted books in collections all over the world.

Curiously, Beard channeled himself into several alter egos, each with a completely fabricated bio. He says this enables him to work within several distinct styles. Bear with me. First was the persona of “Bruce Sargeant” (1898-1938), a spoof on John Singer Sargent. “Bruce Sargeant” is an imagined English artist, a contemporary of E. M. Forster, Rupert Brooke and John Sloan, who purportedly died in a tragic wrestling accident. I kid you not. Mark then created Bruce Sargeant’s teacher, “Hippolyte-Alexandre Michallon”, a 19th-century French Academist. Michallon also taught “Edith Thayer Cromwell”, an American post-modern avant-gardeist. Next up were “Brechtolt Steeruwitz”, a Viennese Expressionist of complex personality, and “Peter Coulter” (b. 1948), a NYC based artist purportedly influenced by Cromwell and Steeruwitz. So Mark Beard is more than one artist – he is at least six. Beard made a mockumentary in which he played five of his alter egos, with critics discussing each artist’s work. I’m not making this up.

Mark Beard painting as Bruce Sargeant: Two Boys Seated on a Bench (below)

Mr. Beard is represented by ClampArt in New York City, where he resides in a 3,700 sq. ft. studio in Hell's Kitchen on West 38th St. that he bought with his partner, James Manfred. Mark Beard outside his NYC studio (below):

I'm afraid I've overemphasized Mark's paintings. He has designed sculptures (above) and the 18-foot tall doors of the Edmond J. Safra Synagogue (below) on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. The bronze doors bear a tree of life design, a representation of the process by which the universe came into being.

Michelangelo

Renaissance artist Michelangelo (1475-1564) was born in Florence as Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni. His statue of David (1504) in Florence and his frescoes in the Vatican’s Sistine Chapel (1512), which took four years to complete, are among the most famous works of art in the western world. He worked until a few days before his death at the age of eighty-eight, leaving an important legacy in sculpture, painting, drawing, and architecture. So great was his fame that he was the first Western artist of whom a biography was published during his lifetime.

Many of his drawings, paintings and sculptures are of a homoerotic nature, and he had relationships with many of his young models: Gherardo Perini, the nobleman Tommaso Cavalieri, Cecchino dei Bracci and a young male prostitute by the name of Febo di Poggio. He referred to Febo as a “little blackmailer,” because Febo demanded money, clothes, and assorted gifts in return for his love. Perini lived with Michelangelo for more than ten years. Bracci was only thirteen when the sixty-six year old Michelangelo fell in love with him. Two years later, when Bracci died, Michelangelo was so devastated that he wrote epitaphs for the youth’s tomb for an entire year, such as this example:


The earthy flesh, and here my bones,
Deprived of handsome eyes, and charming air,
Do yet attest how gracious I was in bed,
When he embraced, in whom my soul now lives.

Well, there you have it. Michelangelo’s correspondence, poetry and diaries that refer to his passion for young men were suppressed for centuries, and his love poems written to Cavalieri were censored by his publisher, who changed the gender from male to female in order to avoid scandal. Michelangelo was himself quite secretive, burning all of his personal drawings and papers before he died. In one sonnet Michelangelo wrote that the highest form of love cannot be for a woman, because “a woman is not worthy of a wise and virile heart.”

Michelangelo painted and sculpted a lot of beefcake. The Sistine Chapel ceiling is awash in paired male nudes. There are 48 naked boys depicting cherubs alongside 24 mostly naked youths, 16 adult male nudes supporting the Medallions, 16 bronze male nudes flanking the Ancestors, plus the famous 20 Ignudi (seated males) depicted as young, completely naked men. None of these figures has any relevance to a Christian narrative. They are on the ceiling because Michelangelo was besotted with masculinity. Pure and simple. Even his female figures had rather masculine bodies, differentiated from the men only by their longer hair.

After 1534, Michelangelo turned his attention almost exclusively to architecture. He became the architect of St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome, which had already been under construction for forty years. The massive dome he designed for St. Peter’s is among the greatest architectural and engineering feats of its time; Michelangelo’s red chalk drawing of its trademark radial columns was not unearthed in the Vatican archives until 2007.